Go Ask Alice Summary

An unnamed fifteen-year-old diarist, whom the novel's title refers to as Alice, starts a diary. With a sensitive, observant style, she records her adolescent agony: she worries about what her crush Roger thinks of her; she despises her weight gain; she fears her budding sexuality; she is uncomfortable at school; she has difficulty relating to her parents. Alice's father, a college professor, accepts a teaching position at a different college and the family will move at the start of the new year, which cheers Alice up. The move is difficult. While the rest of her family adjusts to the new town, Alice feels like an outcast at school. Soon she meets Beth, a Jewish neighbor, and the two become fast friends. Beth leaves for summer camp and Alice goes to live with her grandparents. She is bored, but reunites with an old friend, Jill, who invites Alice to a party. At the party, Alice unwittingly drops LSD and experiences a "beautiful" drug trip. Though curious, she vows not to do drugs again.

Alice happily experiments with more drugs and loses her virginity while on acid. Roger and his parents show up unexpectedly to visit her grandfather, who has had a small heart attack. Alice is amazed by Roger but feels guilty about her drug use and loss of virginity. She doesn't know who she can talk to bout drugs. She is worried that she may be pregnant. Alice goes home and her family accepts her warmly. Unable to sleep, she receives powerful tranquilizers from her doctor. Beth returns from camp, but Alice finds that Beth has changed. In a boutique, Alice meets Chris, a hip girl. Alice's parents worry about Alice's "hippie" appearance. Alice and Chris are both dissatisfied with the establishment and their own families. Alice gets a job working with Chris, and the two become best friends. At school, they use drugs and are popular. Chris's friend Richie, a college boy, turns Alice on to marijuana. To make more money for drugs, she and Chris sell drugs and...

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...GoAskAlice
By: Anonymous
GoAskAlice is a diary of an unnamed fifteen-year-old teenage girl whose book title refers to as Alice. She is just a typical girl who writes about her teenage experiences such as her crush Roger, losing weight, troubles in school and a difficult relationship with her parents. Her father has just accepted a new job in a different town, so they will be moving at the beginning of the new school year. It is difficult for her at her new school. No one talks to her and she just feels as if she is an outcast. Soon she meets a girl named Beth and they became very close friends. When Beth decides to go to a summer camp, Alice goes to her grandparents’ house for the summer. While she was there, she met an old friend name Jill who invited her to a party that night. At the party, Alice unknowingly takes the drug LSD and has the greatest experience of her life. She found out later what happened and swore to never do drugs again. As Alice continues to hang around the same people, she experiments with other different types of drugs. She knows what she is doing is wrong and she is troubled, but she has no one else to talk to besides her diary and she returns home to her family. Her old best friend Beth comes back from camp but things aren’t the same anymore. Alice meets a girl...

...Introduction
GoAskAlice is a 1971 book about the life of a troubled teenage girl. The book continues its claim to be the actual diary of an anonymous teenage girl who became addicted to drugs. Beatrice Sparks is listed as the author of the book by the U.S. Copyright Office. The novel, whose title was taken from a line in the Grace Slick, penned Jefferson Airplane song "White Rabbit", "goaskAlice/when she's ten feet tall", is presented as an anti-drug testimonial. The memoirist's name is never given in the book.
Revelations about the book's origin have been a cause of doubt as to its authenticity and factual accounts, and the publishers have listed it as a work of fiction since at least the mid-late 1980s. Although it is still published under the byline "Anonymous", it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks. Some of the days and dates referenced in the book put the timeline from 1968 until 1970. Its major themes would be difficulty of communication and problems of adolescent identity. It is written a series of events in the form of multiple diary entries.
Summary of Content
September 18th- December 25th
Alice explains that she bought herself a diary in high spirits, after being asked out by a guy she liked. She believed she finally had beautiful thoughts to shear with herself through writing. Following the next day, he...

...GoAskAlice
Have you ever had a problem? I'm sure you have because everybody
sometime in there life does. The book I read GoAskAlice by an anonymous author
is all about problems, conflicts, and how to deal with them.
I would give a lot of information on the author if that was possible,
but the author is anonymous so I can not do so.
From the very first page I had a hunch that this book was about a drug
addiction problem. "SUGAR & SPICE & EVERYTHING NICE; ACID & SMACK & NO WAY BACK"
(page 1). That was a very moving quote for me. I am not sure exactly why but I
guess because it shows how dangerous drugs can be.
This book is based on a true diary of a young girl who got mixed up in
the drug world.
Alice bought a diary because she had a big secret that she could never
tell any of her friends. It really only ended up being that a boy named Roger
she was in love with stood her up and she would be to embraced to tell her
friends. She makes a big deal out of it, I can already tell she is dramatic.
Her birthday is only five days apart from mine, that is a weird
coincidence.
From September 19 through September 25 she goes on about how nothing
every happens in her life. She does not enjoy her teachers, subjects and school.
She thinks everything is losing interest and everything's dull. I think she just
is going through the "teenager blues".
Julie Brown had a party but she...

...Anonymous. "GoAskAlice." New York: Avon Books,1982
1. Point of view-the perspective from which the author tells the story.
"Alice writes in her undated diary from a hospital. She is unsure how she has ended up here and can only think of the worms she thinks are eating her alive. She has apparently been biting her fingers down to the bone." Undated (July)
The book " GoAskAlice" was written in in first person. This gives the reader an idea of what Alice is thinking and her feelings on what she is battling in her life.
2. symbolism- using one idea to represent a larger idea.
"As a purported piece of non-fiction, GoAskAlice does not have any explicit symbols, but Alice's nightmares and hallucinations of maggots and worms eating away at corpses or her own body can be viewed as a dual symbol."
At first, Alice's fears of the maggots center on the loneliness of the individual mind. No one knows what happens to a body underground, hidden from sight. Alice's loneliness and her feeling that only "Diary" understands her connects this anxiety: she fears no one knows what is happening in her mind. In the hospital, she fears that even she does not know what is happening in her mind, and her memory of her unintentional overdose deliver the maggots a second meaning.
3. irony- discrepancy between...

...Alice in Horrorland
GoAskAlice, said to be by an anonymous author and edited by Beatrice Sparks, is a
haunting, yet extraordinary novel. GoAskAlice talks about the dangers and consequences of
using drugs. Its genre is contemporary classic fiction.
Although GoAsk Alice’s book cover says to have been written by “Anonymous”,
meaning that it was written by the owner of the diary, Beatrice Sparks, a psychologist, claims to
have written it (Goldberg 1). Eight years after it was first published, Sparks admitted that she
wrote the novel and that there was a real “Alice”, but that she had added other similar events that
had occurred to other patients of hers. Due to this, GoAskAlice is labeled as fiction rather than
nonfiction. GoAskAlice is in a first point of view perspective since it is a girl’s diary. This
affects the novel by making us question whether or not what Alice says is entirely true. The
reason why I chose to read GoAskAlice is because I was already planning on reading this novel
One literary device that Sparks uses a lot in the novel is hyperbole. An example of a
hyperbole in GoAskAlice is...

...GoAskAlice ~ Anonymous
“GoAskAlice” claims to be written by an anonymous individual on the book itself, but resources say it was written by Beatrice Sparks-an American therapist and Mormon youth counselor who was known for producing books that were the “real diaries” of troubled teenagers. Typically her books focused on topical issues such as drug abuse, Satanism, and teenage pregnancy or AIDS. She was born in Goldburg, Idaho on January 15, 1918 and her life came to a conclusion May 25, 2012. Sparks began working with teenagers in 1955 after she graduated from Brigham Young University. She has worked as a music therapist at Utah State Mental Hospital and taught continuing education courses at BYU. This realistic fiction novel was published March 5, 1971. The difficulty of was average and extremely easy to follow along.
This novel is about the life of a 15 year old troubled teenage girl, who's name remains anonymous, and is written in the form of her diary. She often writes about her thoughts and issues such as crushes, weight loss, her sexuality, being socially accepted, and difficulty with her parents. Her father is a college professor and accepts a teaching position at a new college, which requires them to move. She doesn’t have any friends at her new school and feels like an outcast, but one day makes friends with a girl named Beth. The anonymous girl moves back to her hometown...

...GoAskAliceGoAskAlice should be taught in language arts curricula’s. Any piece of literature that pushes boundaries in school systems is then questioned whether or not it should be taught. Without this type of literature students would never be able to truly benefit from the quality of these extraordinary books. Commonly, books that have the potential to change student's perspectives are the ones that are banned; novels such as GoAskAlice have the ability to benefit students.
In today’s society kids experience much more extremes than ever before. GoAskAlice covers the topics of experimenting with drugs, alcohol, and sex. Many parents and school administrators are outraged when they learn about this novel; afraid what it might teach their children. What most people do not take into consideration relates to the fact that kids in high school these days have either already been experimenting or have been exposed to those elements. “One out of three girls in the United States get pregnant before age 20, and thirty eight percent of high school students have used marijuana”(Fyfe). This type of novel does not convince the kids to start living this lifestyle it will only dissuade them from trying it. In today’s society kids are exposed to so much information through media outlets. Less and less is being...

...GoaskAlice
The novel, or diary, deals with the downfall of a young teenage girl in America, and her journals over the course of two years and a few days. At the beginning of the book, "Alice" is a typical, insecure, middle-class teenager preoccupied with boys, diets, and popularity. Her fortunes take a sharp turn for the worse when her family moves to a new town and she finds herself less popular and more isolated than ever before. Unhappy in the new town, she is overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town to spend the summer with her grandparents. During this stay she is invited to a party by an old acquaintance; there she unwittingly ingests LSD that had been added to random bottles of Coca-Cola and distributed to the party guests as a game. The other guests had mistakenly assumed Alice was aware of what the "game" entailed. After this first unwitting, but pleasurable, experience, she seeks drugs deliberately, and rapidly proceeds to marijuana,and amphetamines. She describes her drug experiences intricately; the more extreme the supposed diarist's drug experience, the more sophisticated and descriptive her writing becomes.
A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town encourage her to turn away from drugs; however she soon willingly falls in with the drug crowd where finally she finds acceptance. She starts dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to grade-schoolers for him. After...